from tumblr’s sad girl to tiktok’s bad girl

Trigger warning mention of self-harm and depression

I have lived my sad girl era more than once since the angsty age of 13 and I am still inclined to wander back to the days of listening to Lana del Rey, crying in the bath and pitifully dwelling on how the patriarchal world is against me. The Tumblr Sad Girl aesthetic can be summed up with soft pastel or black and white images of plump chapped lips smoking cigarettes or smudged mascara, sombre faces all captioned with Lana Del Rey lyrics such as ‘Sitting in your sweatshirt, crying in the backseat.’

The Tumblr sad girl was made up of several cultural factors, she listened to sad/slow indie music, namely artists’s such as Marina and the Diamonds, Lana del Rey and The Smiths. Her fashion sense could be defined as soft grunge, and the most important factor of course she perpetually conveyed her melancholy online. I use the word melancholy because the sadness that is conveyed by the Sad Girls is not just a pathetic useless type of sadness it can be defined as a state of melancholia. According to Cvetkovich Melancholia is a type of beautiful sadness that from it buds inspiration and creativity. The Tumblr Sad Girl was at her height between 2012- 2014, when I was in my early to mid-teens. I must admit I did fall victim to the stream of consciousness posts about depression and photos of self-harm marks on pale wrists. I’ve spent my fair share of time wallowing just to feel cool. Of course, like with anything the ‘Sad Girl’ can be looked at from two different angles, on one hand it could be viewed as liberating as it created space and a community where one could safely talk about one’s mental illness and find comfort in the fact that there is an abundance of others who also feel shitty a large majority of the time.

However, the reality is that romanticising mental illness and ‘unstableness’ is ultimately damaging as it can cause young girls to seek acceptance from the community. Thus preventing them from seeking help from a professional because if they are working on becoming healthy, they no longer fit into the helpless melancholic persona of the Sad Girl. The Sad Girl is not just about being namely sad and sharing that experience and if that was the case it would be less problematic. It is an online aesthetic which is purposed to portray the blogger behind the Tumblr page as melancholically self-destructive through blurred image and edgy quotes like ‘you like your girls insane.’ The glamourisation of mental illness along with the promotion of self-destructive behaviour seems to me like a recipe for a generation of girls with toxic behavioural patterns.

Although ‘The Sad Girl’ of Tumblr has been around for only a decade, it is not the first time in history sad tragic women have been sensationalised. To name the obvious Ophelia in Hamlet and Juliet in Romeo & Juliet. Real life examples could be the obsession with the ‘tortured’ public figure such as Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland. Tumblr is also not the first to use melancholy has been an aesthetic, in fact it has been done again and again throughout art history. For example, Lachrymae, which can be directly translated to tears, a piece by Lord Federic Leighton painted in the 19^th century. It captures a woman leaning on a column bowing her head in a state of melancholia. This type of art stirs us up and hits us in deeper places than a piece that shows less intensity of emotion. Sadness can be beautiful and there will always be people in history trying to depict it. These examples depict the outside obsession with sad and tragic women, whereas the Sad Girl is focused on the self as a product of sadness and destructiveness. She is self-aware of her state but quite happy in staying static in her unhealthy idealisation of mental illness and toxic traits. This is reminiscent of the confession poets to name the most recognisable Sylvia Plath and Anne Saxton. Confessional poetry was literary a movement in 1950s and 1960s, it is described as poetry of the personal or ‘I.’ It touched on taboo subjects of the time such as suicide, sex and mental illness. Sylvia Plath was known for her idealisation of suicide in both her poems and her part-fiction book The Bell Jar. Plath writes in her poem Lady Lazarus ‘Dying is an art, like everything else I do exceptionally well.’ Now this is the stuff that the Sad Girls eat up, it’s tragically beautiful and deep which is exactly what being a Sad Girl is all about or trying to look like she’s about.

The pressing question is… is she back? Following the That Girl trend that featured videos of women waking up at 5am to do yoga and drink green juice it is possible that there has been a re-emergence of this wallowing self-destructive online persona. Similarly, to the Tumblr Sad Girl movement following the rise of bubble-gum pop and honestly, who can blame them because no Katy Perry we don’t feel like ‘a plastic bag.’ When typing #sadgirl into TikTok there are an abundance of teenage girls crying in videos that are captioned with phrases that are screaming I AM DEEP ‘I cried like this and had to pick myself up on my own.’ This behaviour is somewhat reminiscent of the Sad Girl’s narrative although the aesthetic is lacking, and the videos seem as if they have had no thought put into them. However, there is a rise of an aesthetic on TikTok using the hashtags #femalemanipulator and #girlblogger the common denominators with the Sad Girl are Lana del Rey, pastel colours, soft aesthetic, skinny pale women and an embrace of self-destructiveness. Although this time round she is not passive in her pain that has been inflicted on her by men in toxic relationships, she is active in flipping that pain into manipulative tactics on men to regain a sense of power. Female manipulator content idealises toxic female characters like Maddy Perez from Euphoria, Amy Dunne from Gone Girl and the unnamed narrator in Ottessa Moshfegh novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

 Despite this trend being highly unhealthy it could appear empowering on the surface because the idea is to take back control from men. But it’s still about men and these female manipulators reek of women who are making these videos while eagerly awaiting a man to text them back. Some that are creating female manipulator content have stated that this is an ironic trend used as a way to reclaim their power from men which could suggest that Sad Girl 2014 has evolved into an ironically humorous idealisation of female negative qualities rather than the plain old wallowing of the Tumblr girl. But whether this content is ironic or not there are still young impressionable viewers on TikTok that could be especially vulnerable to the promotion of negative qualities much like 14-year-old me trying to have depression and an eating disorder in the Tumblr Sad Girl era. Oversaturated exposure to vulnerable people is even more of a risk today because of TikTok’s relentless algorithm.

Well, she is back kind of, in terms of a trend that embraces Lana del Rey, Girl Interrupted and self-aware destruction. My takeaway from diving into women being messy online is that there’s no one else like Lana del Rey to promote a wide range of aesthetically pleasing toxic trends. In the age of technology whether it be the 2010s or the 2020s there will always be aesthetic trends that promote unhealthy idealisation of mental illness and destructive behaviour. Long live the queen of the sad girls.

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